Situational and Personality Variables as Influencing the Relationship between Attitudes and Overt Behaviour *

Cette etude s'interesse particulierement a la relation qui existe entre les attitudes verbales vis‐a‐vis la legislation de la marijuana et un aspect de la conduite explicite exprimee par rapport a l'objet de cette attitude. Plus precise‐ment, nous voulons determiner dans quelle mesure la conduite se dissocie des attitudes lorsqu'on demande aux sujets observes de poser un geste concret en presence de deux temoins. II s'agit de savoir si la conduite individuelle se situe dans le prolongement de l'attitude lorsque cette contrainte sociale est operante dans la situation en tant que variable nouvelle. Cette recherche tente egalement d'apprecier les effets de deux autres facteurs: le besoin d'etre approuve (une variable psychologique) et la congruence (une variable liee a la situation). The reported study concerns the relationship between verbal attitudes toward the legalization of marijuana and one form of overt behaviour expressed toward this attitude object. More specifically, interest lay in determining how behaviour deviated from consistency with attitudes when subjects were asked to perform an overt act in the immediate presence of two other individuals. The main concern was to determine whether or not an individual's behaviour would remain consistent when this “social constraint” was injected into a situation as an intervening variable. The research also attempted to ascertain the effects of two additional factors; need for approval (a personality variable) and con‐gruency (a situational variable).